3 Monts

Name: 3 Monts
Style: Bière de Garde
ABV: 8.5%
Serving: 750ml bottle
Brewery: Brasserie de Saint Sylvestre
Location: Saint-Sylvestre, Cappel, France
Weblink: Brasserie de St-Sylvestre

Ok, so it has been a while. Sorry to all my loyal readers for the long silence. There are some of you out there, aren't there? Hello? Hello?? Oh well, I always did like talking to myself I guess. So, another product of a quick trip over the border into Quebec. I really should have thought harder about opening a bottle of beer that is the same size and strength as a bottle of traditional German reisling, especially when I'm drinking alone. You'll just have to have a glass too, won't you? Right, all together then...

The beer pours with a clear, pale straw-yellow body, riven by a dense cloud of champagne-like bubbles that produce a thick, dense head that lasts for ages. The aromas the work their way up through the head are dominated by a slightly vegetal, almost celery-like musty note, overlying a sweet silage (from a proper clamp mind, none of this plastic-sheeting-and-old-tyres nonsense here) and yeasty background. In the mouth this disappears into a honeyed sweetness with a refined, crisply dry hoppy backbone. Surprisingly pilsner-like for a Flemish strong ale... Unfortunately this is not a beer that wears its alcohol content lightly, with most of the later flavours and all of the aftertaste being formed of distinctly vodka-like ethanol character, possibly with a slightly rye-bread sourness.

I'm left feeling that I probably drank this beer too soon. Bière de Garde means "beer to save", after all, so I suspect that had I given it another year on the shelf it may have developed a bit more complexity. As it stands it just tastes a little raw, with the alcohol still too high in the flavour mix. I can taste that there is more to come; already there is a pleasantly Belgian-style malt and yeast sweetness there, but it seems very subdued. As I type I am only a few centimetres into my first glass (750ml bottle!) so perhaps as the evening wears on it will open out some. I'll let you know if it does.